Printer User Interface - wishlist  

Printer User Interface - wishlist

I love my Prusa MK2 MM, period. It's the best printer quality wise I had the chance to try yet and I love the philosophie behind the printer and also the company. But the userinterface to control the printer is... basic to say the least. My previous printer was a Wanhao Duplicator i3 and although it's inferiour in every way to the Prusa, it's UI is the exception. And I am not even speaking about the touchscreen but how the UI is organized and how the workflow is modeled.

Maybe I just don't understand concepts you had in mind when putting together the UI so please educate me if I am doing something wrong or not the way Prusa supposed to. Anyway, here's the list of things I'd wish they would be changed in future updates:

1. Loading filament - why do I first have to go in the preheat menu, preheat, exit and go into the load menu? This could be combined in one single step, e.g.: Load PLA (215/55), Load ABS (245/90) and so on. When you chose this option it first preheats and once the target temperature is met, loading can begin by pressing the button, preheating the bed could be made optional.

2. Unloading filament: please stay in the Unload menu after the action was executed. It was a problem on the non-MM version already that sometimes the filament would not unload properly the first time and it's even worse with the MM version, sometimes it takes several attempts to unload. Just stay in "Unload" screen and give the option to do it again or exit and don't decide for the user to exit a section ever, personally I think it's bad UI design in most cases anyway, it's why I use Linux and not Apple 😉

3. Axis Movement: Before I preheat I usually raise the printhead on the Z-Axis to about half to check the noozle for filament and clean it, it's the axis I use the most and on every print. But it's buried in the third submenu of the "Settings" menu, which is on line 7 of a 4 line LCD so one has to scroll down on a laggy LCD before getting there. This gets particularly annoying when resolving a problem with the printhead.

Several solutions to that, the deluxe version would be a "Move Z-Axis" option on the first 4 lines of the main menu, directly under "Info Screen". Or a "Move Axis" Menu on the Top level (as opposed to inside the "Settings") and have the Z-Axis on Top of the Submenu, not at the bottom (again scrolling on laggy screen). [EDIT]: No longer relevant....

4. Menu organization: from a (my) workflow point of view I think this structure would be more ideal:
Top Tier: Info Screen, Print from SD, Move Z-Axis (one can always try), Load Filament (incl. Preheat), Unload, Preheat (without load), Settings, Cailbration, Change Extruder (MM), Statistics, Support

The idea behind this is: the first four lines on the LCD provide options that are used on most prints, the next four maybe once per print session and the remainer in special occasions.

5. Preheat: I know this was asked before but please for the love of the craft, let us set our own pre-heat temperatures. I have 10 spools of PLA from four different manufactorers (Primavalue, FormFutura, Voltivo, Renkforce) and I print none of them with 215, the bandwith I use for those are 190-205. In fact, other than the Prusa PLA I haven't seen any other brand that prefers such high temperatures (there are others for sure, just not provided by the retailers I usually use). So, given that you gave us the power to build our own MM printer, please let us also chose the preheat temperatures 😀

I hope you consider some of these points and maybe find the time to implement at least some of them. I also hope that the answer won't be "it's all addressed in the MK3" because I just got my MK2S 5 months ago and I want to keep it for a while before I replace it 😉